In keeping with the Grapes of Wrath freshman reading requirement, there’s currently a small exhibit of Dorothea Lange’s depression era photographs at the Carol Tatkon Center on North Campus. These photographs illustrate the uncertainty, chaos and fear that ran rampant during the Great Depression. Most of the photographs are portraits, but some are simply taken of the areas in which the people photographed lived, worked and eventually died. These portraits are of those individuals hardest hit by the depression: migrant workers, sharecroppers and farmers, many of whom had to travel West in hope of finding jobs and starting anew.Lange's photos hang in the Tatkon Center

Currently on view at the Johnson Museum, Daniel Nadler’s ’54 photographs of Theyyam Rituals of Kerala offer an extraordinary view into the local religious traditions of the south Indian state of Kerala. These performances, in which a male performer is used a vehicle for the spirit of a god, were captured by chance by Nadler while he and his wife travelled through India in 2004.

Life magazine’s inaugural issue was published on Nov. 23, 1936, just four months after the start of the Spanish Civil War. For the first few weeks of its existence, the pages Life dedicated to the war in Spain were astoundingly few, especially relative to the coverage domestic and other foreign affairs received. As Life boomed and the war raged on, the magazine claimed to present a balanced account of the conflict but in reality — notably in photography — favored the fascist Nationalist forces.

Eyes of the Flaneuse: Women Photographers of New York City

Johnson Museum of Art

Thursday Mar. 12, 5:15 p.m.

In conclusion of the Johnson’s exhibit “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” Prof. Mary Woods, a professor from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning will be speaking about a series of female photographers from the early 20th century. Woods’ brings a critical eye towards the stereotypical understanding of architecture and urbanism through her interest in photography, film and other representations of American culture. Give this timely union of art and feminism a spin; it's Women's History Month, after all. — A.L.

Haudenosaunee Project

Ithaca Ink Shop

Mar. 6 - Mar. 27

Snowscape: A Series of Portraits, an installation by Mollie Miller ’10, currently in Tjaden Gallery, is not for the faint of heart. The works, which include photography, lithography, drawing, painting and video, will require your full attention and some serious study. The installation follows the stanzas of Miller's poem, titled “Snowscape,” giving equal weight to written text, large black-and-white photos and small, fast drawings. The installation culminates in two projections at the far end of the gallery.

Two fifth-year architects have teamed up to display their very different artworks in Sibley’s Hartell gallery. Both artists explore the way their objects interact with the viewer’s body: physically and culturally provoking the viewer to imagine the contours of what one chooses to embrace and what one chooses to give up. Like the image of Rubin’s face/vase (replaced by the artists’ profiles), which they display on their lone curatorial placard, absence always hugs and contains the material as its unacknowledged background.

To further illustrate the point, the curators have organized the work into four sections: Paradise Lost, Paradise Reconstructed, Despairing of Paradise and Paradise Anew. Each offering its own insight onto the issue, contemplating Eden within the multi-faceted contexts of philosophy, art history and current affairs.

Visions of Paradise

As I walked down the wood-paneled hallway of the first floor in the Johnson, I spied the current resting place for a couple dozen or so photographs out of the world famous Martin Margulies collection. Mr. Margulies’ extensive anthology is based in Miami, but, until January 4, a presentation of photographs titled Silent but Not Quiet: The Message in Documentary Photographs stands menacingly in Bower’s Gallery, daring you to ponder what commonalities exist between the diverse arrangement of photos and how something can be silent yet still make a sound.

I often feel clueless trying to identify the many stars, planets and orbital objects speckled across Ithaca’s anomalous, clear night sky. I admit to feeling a tug of glee when identifying Orion, the Big Dipper or the three stars of the Summer Triangle. No matter how knowledgeable or ignorant one is about the positions and names of the objects in the night sky, it’s never been possible to see more than small white pinpricks of light with the unaided eye.

Mary Ellen Mark has traveled around the world on assignments, capturing sub-cultures of outcasts, freaks, misfits and wunderkinds with her cameras. Whether it’s pictures of Bombay prostitutes or the elderly in Miami nursing homes, photos of circus trainers with their animals or behind the scenes glimpses of celebrities in Hollywood, her documentary portraiture aims to make us feel that her exotic subjects share an emotional commonality with their audience.